Nathan Spearing: Army Ranger, A Warrior Tending Gardens: Dominion, Stewarding, and Small Business

The Cost of Warrior Identity and the Call to Repentance

Exploring theology, doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between. Broadcasting from an undisclosed location, Dead Men Walking. Oh, it's not undisclosed now. No. They know where we're at. Oh yeah.

Watch out. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking. We're live at Fight and Laugh Feast Conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. Interviewing all types of interesting people. We're getting the word of God.

We're fighting, we're laughing, we're feasting. And we've got a guest here that I just met. A new friend. He's from Warriors Tending Gardens. Interesting shirt. I walked up to him, we start talking, and I just thought it was such an interesting concept.

Can you introduce yourself and explain a little bit?

Yes, so name's Nathan Spearing. Did 14 years special operations in the Army. Thank you for your service. My pleasure. I'd do it again, but I'm so glad I'm paroled. Paroled. And some of the stuff that's most exciting to me today, I was a warrior.

I guess once always, in some ways. I'm not quite as hardcore as the Marines on that subject. You know, you say a Marine, you know, I'm always a Marine, you know. I was in the Army, but more recently I've been doing small business.

I have five kids, did 12 deployments, and I just, they were growing up, and I wasn't feeling like the time spent overseas outweighed the time away from my family. So I got out six years ago, almost, in December, and started a small business.

And for somebody that went to the very top in the military, excuse me, been talking all day. We're all losing our voices here. No problem. Somebody that went to the top of the military, and then now was home 365 days with my wife and kids, that was harder to me.

I actually was wishing to go back and fight Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan while my wife was gone, doing grocery shopping with my kids. And so I realized that all these years of deploying, all these years of going and doing the things that are sexy in the eyes of the culture, actually was idolatry for me.

And I was living, never really being present with my wife and kids. I was surviving as a dad. Wow. That was brought to the surface when I no longer had this lollipop of going and doing cool missions, going skydiving, going climbing mountains for freedom, for democracy, all the good things.

But I just, I was angry. I was taking out on my kids. My businesses were not doing well. I was blaming everybody else because it couldn't be me. I'm a special operations guy. I'm God's gift to freedom.

How come my businesses are, well, they suck. I'm having trouble paying my mortgage. And so God, that was my time in the wilderness, if you will, as a man. And having to really realize, yeah, I was really good at this special operations stuff, but I'm not as good of a dad as I need to be.

I'm not as good of a husband as I need to be. Business is hard. And when I own the business, I can't really blame anyone else if I own it. It's ultimately my responsibility. And I couldn't hide anymore.

I couldn't blame other people legitimately. And I just had to go to work on myself. I had to own every area of it. And so Warrior Standing Gardens is that we did an inaugural event with the CrossPolitik guys last May, three days, immersive event, shooting.

And I've been telling guys, the guns and the tactics and the shooting is kind of the carrot on the stick. I really wanna get you in there. And I wanna find out what, for me, it was empathy to my daughters.

It was not being angry at my kids because my businesses were failing and that was me. I'm bringing it home. What is that for you? What are you hiding from everyone else? What are you not taking ownership of?

And for me, in this conference, I can go after guys physically. Say, your doctrine's probably great. You do a lot. You have many leather-bound books. Your palette for good scotch. Very learned, yes. But that's manifesting itself at more inches on your waist.

That may actually be, and actually is detrimental to your mental, physical, emotional well-being. It's all connected. I could argue spiritual health, too. Lack of self-control, discipline. And just like if I have a porn addiction, it's affecting everything.

You can't have this secret sin. And so having just literally failed at a lot of things in the military, failed at business, made a lot of mistakes as a dad. And I'm not talking about that to be coddled.

I'm not talking about that to try to get the sympathy card. You say, if we are going to be priests, kings in our household, if we're gonna build the foundational element of our society, which is the family, we have to be multidisciplined.

We have to have dominion over all areas of our lives. And being involved corporately with other men enables those relationships to highlight, if we're really doing relationship correctly, highlight the areas that I'm not doing as well as this other guy.

And it's not about comparing. And us guys have a really good way, we will pivot around and we'll get the vantage point right that we can put this other guy down. For me, I'll be like, well, he's actually studied the word and better, he's committed it to heart, he can call back scripture, he can apply it, but I'm gonna think bad about him because he's not as good a shape as, you know.

And the way this manifested for me personally is I was in special operations going to a great church and I would just kind of, you know, look at these soft civilians. Yeah, sure. And then my wife was like, but you think Ryan could teach you how to be a more patient dad, you know?

And so having to acknowledge that us men being in community and men really being transparent, not in a coddling way, not to say, oh yeah, all of us struggle with porn, man, it's okay. No, that sin is destroying your life and you need to put it to death.

Like Toby said at Grace Agenda, do you really want that sin to be put to death and to call each other out? And so immersive events have been really good for that. We shot sniper rifles, we did PT, we did some breathing, we did some cold plunge stuff, a bunch of stuff physical, but a lot of the guys just found out being with 10 to 15 guys that are serious and we can start to peel back the onion and get at what it is to be a man, how we're failing, get encouragement, get practical, tactical advice.

And I think a lot of what you get at these conferences can be nebulous. Sure. You know, we got to slay the dragon. What does that look like as a former warrior? What's the dragon and how do we slay it?

Oh, we're not going to tell you that. We're just going to give you the slogan. The dragon may be the internet in your home. The dragon may be the women that are having influence on your wife in a negative way.

The dragon may actually be in the can. What you're putting in the refrigerator. What you're putting in the refrigerator that then goes in your mouth and that then has an effect on how you feel, how you sleep, how you can actually work.

And so in a sense, stripping back kind of that comfort and being a little on the nose about some stuff that maybe certain guys can't be and taking that bona fides that comes from special operations but ultimately says, hey, you need to be implying that intensity and that mindset to every area of your life.

Warriors Tending Gardens, Church Partnership, and Practical Dominion

Okay, so for a listener who goes, these are all great concepts and I love what you're saying. What exactly does Warriors Tending Gardens do? Is it a camp? Is it a retail place? Is it a conference?

What exactly are you doing? So I have a weekly podcast, the Life on Target podcast. Life on Target? Life on Target. We've been doing a weekly episode for about a year now. So there's a ton of practical stuff there.

Working out, starting small businesses. I've interviewed probably 10 to 15 men and women about practical things they're doing in their life. So there's a lot of stuff there. We've done a couple in-person events.

I'm building out a facility in North Carolina to be able to bring men, families out. We're gonna do homesteading stuff. We're gonna do physical stuff, shooting, all that stuff. Also, I'll come to your church.

If you got guys that are saying, hey, we got a group of 10, 15 guys, we wanna hear more of this. My website, spearing .co has all my social handles, has a way to inquire about me coming out there. I'd love to partner with your church.

Because ultimately, I don't wanna start a para-church organization that does discipleship that the church should be doing. I want to enable the local church and men in local churches to do this organically where they are.

And some of that may actually be starting with, hey, your pastor needs to start working out. The reason why he can't preach about physical dominion over your body is because it would be hypocritical. He can't talk about money and starting a business and being a steward financially because he's actually a wreck financially.

And even just the reality of the gospel is you don't have to be perfect on these things to teach and to disciple. So I'd like to, if you're listening to this and say it sounds great, just get in touch with me.

Let's figure out how we can enable your church to take dominion in some of these areas. And these circles by percentage are a lot better about the things we're talking about here. You're not gonna say, hey, your kids shouldn't be in public school and everybody's not gonna freak out about that.

We kinda know Christian education is important. But in some sense, you don't just get to farm that out either. As a man, you're responsible. Military has this thing that you can delegate authority but you can never delegate responsibility.

So as a man, are you kinda delegating responsibility to your wife in some things but not really actually being responsible? And that could be education. She homeschools the kids. I go off and I win the bread.

I do my part. When I show up at home, I expect a beer. I expect a little bit of quiet because it's been so hard at the office, babe. You don't get how hard it is to win all this bread when she's been cultivating immortal souls all day and it's been pouring out.

So some of that's, hey, you work out. Not so you can look good in the mirror so that you can actually function after eight hours of work at the office. Show up and be physically attentive to your kids and play tag and wrestle with your boys and do these things while your wife's getting dinner on the table.

And let's do some of those things. Laying out your day practically.

And how do you do that well? Yeah, I've always said women should go to at least one women conference a year for three days just so the dads have to stay home with the kids and remember what it is that if your wife is a homemaker, what she does.

Now I work from home, so I'm home all the time and in and out, which comes with its own struggles. They don't know whether dad's there to play football and play catch or talking to clients. So you have to make that separation.

Homesteading, Food Quality, and Family Resilience

We were talking offline, though, the shift gears here. We were talking offline about homesteading. Why should that be important to Christians and men in particular? Isn't that some crazy conspiracy thing we don't need to worry about?

We got grocery stores, we have electricity, we have all these modern conference. Why should Christians and men in particular be concerned about or even know about homesteading?

Yeah, I think it's not as uncommon these days for people to think about the grocery store, but it's poison for the most part. There's pesticides all over your produce. Your chickens are triple chlorine bath washed and that still has pathogens on it.

Even though they're doing all this chemical stuff to your meat, what is that actually manifesting for a male as your testosterone production? Do you see soy in these things you're putting on? Duke's mayonnaise, soy.

What is that doing as a man when you're ingesting soy? Sure. When you start to look at the ingredients, really look at the ingredients, even though there's maybe three or four, maybe that last one is a proprietary blend of something that says natural so you think it's good, but it's not.

It's not, yeah. It's actually made from the anal glands of a beaver. That's a strawberry flavor. It's ridiculous when you start to peel this back. So mostly what you put in your body matters. Just like how you are spiritually matters.

So to say, when I eat food, it's right, wrong, or indifferent. Something's gonna happen with it. So I gotta put the right things in. So for us as a family, I was reading Rory Grove's book, Durable Trades.

I'm a general contract. That's my day job. So that's another thing. This is in a large way a ministry, but I have a general contracting company. I have real estate. So we have a productive household. I work from home too.

I got an office. I'm back and forth, but I was reading that book and he breaks down the labor market into four sectors with primary being directly from the land. So I was secondary, which takes raw goods from the lands and creates our product and our services are based on taking lumber and doing these things.

I was doing that analysis a year and a half ago. And I was like, essentially your home is more durable or your vocation is more durable the closer to the land that you are. And he has this pyramid. It's like 6 of our labor market is from the land now.

It used to be 68, 70 of households were primary from the land. That's not a good thing. And so I just like, all right, what can we do as a family to just have a little bit more agency over this aspect of our life?

So we just, it's gotta be incremental. So we were living downtown. We didn't really have land yet. And we started doing chickens in the backyard. So we got layers, we got a couple of meat birds and we slaughtered them right there in downtown, Southern Pines, North Carolina.

I pulled my construction trailer so that the neighbors walking their dogs weren't seeing the carnage. So I think that's the reality is that people have this thing that perfection is what we're gonna do.

And John Acuff talks about it. If you have this perfect image in your mind and you never start, that's the way you stay in control. Because you're like, oh, I'm gonna be this great homesteader once I finally get land, once I finally get all these things, or I'm gonna start working out once I got the right shoes and I got the gym membership, or I'm saving for my rogue fitness setup at my house.

And when I get all the squat rack perfect, then I'll work out. And then you never do it. So we started incrementally with chickens in the backyard. We wanna get our kids on the land too, because I grew up on 10 acres and I just wanted my kids to be outside, in the dirt, playing and adventure and just kind of this ruggedness that they could have.

So now we have 54 acres. We have 70 something chickens. We had a really big vegetable garden. We're doing the fall garden now. We're looking to get pigs. We're looking to get cattle now that we have the pasture.

Sure. But in a sense too, I have other businesses. This is gonna become kind of the laboratory where my kids get to do business. My 10 year old son has an egg business. He's carting. Every time we go to church, he's taking six, eight dozen eggs to church and he's selling them.

And having to have the conversation, hey son, some of that's gonna have to go to dad because I just bought this 500 pounds of organic soy feed from this local supplier and half the chickens are yours.

So maybe 150 bucks of that is gonna come out of your thing and he's having to do sales. So he's having to engage with men in our church about payment. And to say, hey, yeah, he owes you money, but you gotta be respectful.

And so having these conversations and going to the pre-industrial revolution household. And if you don't have land, and Joel Salatin talks about this, that's the other thing is like, I gotta be the one that does everything.

Find a local farmer that is doing it and pay full price for what he's doing, his family's doing. Christians are so cheap. I know, right? We want a deal. Do I get 10 off? Do I wanna do? And Doug talks great about this in Gasper Moussaie and how we can abuse a brother's skills and services in the church because we're at church together.

Well, actually the Bible says, pay a man what he's worth. Exactly. Pay him his wages. So that's the way we should. I've had conversations with people at our church. We're like, yeah, we got 75 free range organic chickens that I slaughtered with my kids.

And they're like, yeah, well it gotta be Walmart prices, you know? And like, your husband's a doctor, you know? Why are you telling me I gotta commoditize something that's not a commodity, you know? It is completely different product than what Walmart is selling.

And then I Yeah, if you want Walmart price it, why are you here then? Yeah, yeah. And the church is buying low quality food and wondering why we have disease, you know? And we just can't make these connections.

And so for me, I saw an opportunity to start doing that. And a lot of that's gonna be is we're gonna do this. My kids are gonna do businesses. My primary business is in construction and stuff. But we want our kids to do it.

We wanna have, I wanna have something that's a little easier to work alongside my sons. And eventually, I mean, I say churches should have a plan to feed, locally feed each other. You know, if there's a market stressor and supply chain ripple kind of effect.

And the term for this is kind of personal runway. Yeah. And personal runway is a lot of things. How many days can you go without getting money before everything falls down? Yeah. How many days can you go without power?

How many days can you go without food? How many days can you, like, what do you have organically? And this is not prepper. Yeah. This is not freak out. You know, oh, Lord Jesus, come back quick. You know, whatever.

No. No, this is wisdom and discernment. This is what Joseph did. Yeah. I'm looking at the way things are going. And I'm thinking maybe we should set aside a fifth. Yeah. Just because it's gonna be famine, potentially.

Sure. There's ebbs and flows in society. There's readjustments. There's resets and things. It's bound to happen. We can't keep printing this much currency. We can't be giving out this much bad debt. We can't be doing all these things and there not be consequences.

And when the shock comes, as the church, and as families, are we gonna be ready to minister to people that are hungry and are starving? I would say we're not.

Personal Runway, Tax-Advantaged Preparedness, and Church Resilience

We're not gonna be ready. The majority of churches who are supposed to provide, not only for their flock, but for the poor and destitute, if something were to happen, they would look to the federal government and go, where's our food banks?

Yes. We're a non-profit. Could you send us some food down? Yeah. When in fact, what you're saying is very important, where you're saying, I wanna take men, train them to then go back to their local churches, to then flourish out from there and say, okay, we can self-sustain, provide for ourselves.

Right. And I think it's ready .gov. Yep. Has a list of equipment that they recommend every business own in the event of a natural disaster or storm or whatever. So if you own a small business as a man and you have money coming in in excess of what you need to feed your family, you can buy generators.

Yep. You can buy grain. You can buy fuel. You can buy all these things that the government says every business should have. So that you're resilient and it's tax-free. Because your business bought it based on the government recommendation to be prepared for natural disasters, to be prepared for shocks in the market.

Sure. And you have to have a business that's profitable, and you have your overhead has to be low as a family. You have to have excess, but also when you have a business, all these things that you need to be resilient, to have personal runway are tax-free things.

Yeah. My business bought my tractor. My business is building my barns. My business is the infrastructure for these farms. It's all tax-free money because it's building businesses. Yeah, my business bought my generator.

Exactly. I'm a realtor. Exactly. But I have an office on my property and it needs to be powered possibly. Exactly. You do not want to miss a client calling you and buying a house in a storm. No way. You gotta get it.

And so I think that first, and as a small business owner, and some of this is military training, I had to go into these places and be effective. I had to work with multiple government agencies. I was in the most effective branch of the government, Department of Defense, but I still felt like it was dysfunctional.

I still had to be, do these strategic narratives to get the mission accomplished. And we're just not, as Christians, we're not thinking very creatively. Right. We're not realizing that there's systems in place that are beneficial for us if we're shrewd, if we understand the times, if we're able to be discerning.

And so, and that there's these guys that are out there that know this. They may not be on your session. They may not be out, but as a church, you can reach out to some of these men and you can bring them in, and you can do workshops, and you can start to push the envelope, and you can start to pull people out of their comfort zone in ways that enables them to have more dominion over their life.

Yeah. Everything.

Building Men, Abraham's 318 Trained Men, and Multi-Generational Work

So if we've got an audience member out there right now, and they're a member of a church, or an elder, or a pastor, they're listening, and they go, this sounds like something that I wanna do for my church, how would they get ahold of you?

Where do they go? And then also, throw out the podcast again so they could take a listen to those resources.

Yeah, so spearing .co, S-P-E-A-R-I-N-G .co. And we'll link all this up, when it goes live. Is the website. And right at the top, there's a button, Book Nathan Virtual In-Person. And it'll be a contact form, and it'll go right to my inbox, and we'll work it out.

We'll craft the event. We can do, if you're trying to do multiple churches, my website supports, I can get you a link and handle all the payment stuff there, and we can work at, you know, I've done some stuff with churches, say, hey, put the event out, you guys promote it locally, I'll show up.

You know, it'll go through this thing, and then I'll write your church a check at the end of it, profit share. Like, this is a very simple thing, and I got the infrastructure to book it, and you guys do the promoting.

If you guys wanna say, no, no, we just wanna, our session will bring you out, what's your fee? We can work it out that way. Okay. And we can craft something specifically. And then I got, there's a lot of guys out there in the network, John Moody, Rory Groves, C .R. Wiley and myself are working on some strategic things for curriculums for men and boys.

And so we're working at potentially, then in the spring, we'll be going out to C .R. Wiley's church and doing a men's conference. And really, ultimately, it's about getting a bunch of men in the room together.

Yeah. And in some ways, getting away from our wives, and so that we can be real about some things. And we can preserve the leadership aspect of it. We're not compromising the hierarchical integrity of things, the way God's ordered it.

But we can also be serious about growth in the areas that we're thinking, God doesn't have dominion over that. I get to just kind of harbor this sun over here, and it's not gonna affect anything. It has generational effects.

And we need to get busy. So yeah, I'd love to come to the church, love to, you know, got some land, wanna do some shooting, whatever, just we can work it out. But yeah, serious about strong men, multidisciplined men.

You know, in Abraham, Genesis 14, 14, he took his 318 trained men, that word right there, hanuk, set apart, chosen. He had 318 men that could go execute a nighttime hostage rescue mission. Pause agrarian activities and go launch a hostage rescue mission by night, dividing the forces, conquering, when other kingdoms around couldn't even do it.

And he's so rich. He said, oh yeah, we just plundered these kingdoms. We rescued everybody. I don't want anything. I'm rich. God's already, this wasn't about me going and profiting off of violence. This wasn't about me trying to get ahead in life.

This was about truly protecting the downtrodden. There's no ulterior motives here. My guys risked some stuff. They're gonna get some stuff. They risked it, but it's not me. And to have 318 men and their families, and you're feeding all of them organically from your household, you know?

And that is what the household should be. I think maybe culturally where we're at, one man is not gonna be, like the church could have that size. But the capacity exists in your, to say pause. We're productive over here.

That margin that we got in business and agrarian activities, we've already, we've cross-trained on nighttime hostage rescue too. We're ready for that. We're ready to go over here. And I just did a podcast with Anthony Esselin.

It just hit Friday, today. And men used to get together and build things. We don't really get together and build things much anymore. Not a whole lot. We sit around, we drink some scotch, and we talk about how manly we are.

Let's get together and build some things. Let's get together and do some stuff, productive, multi-generational, lasting. I love it. Yeah. Cool.

Closing Encouragement and Podcast Sign-Off

Well, Nathan, thank you so much. Warriors Tending Gardens. Guys, if you're listening, go check out the podcast. We'll link everything up for you. It was so nice meeting you. I know we're gonna be talking in the future.

What you got going on is so interesting and so needed, I think, in the American church as well. We appreciate you, brother, and all that you do. Thanks for having me. Guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of Dead Men Walking Podcast.

As always, God bless. Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Dead Men Walking Podcast for full video podcast episodes and clips. Or email us at deadmenwalkingpodcast at gmail .com. None of your biscuits.